[gbog]

That do not match my experience in a Chinese Web company. All my colleagues are very good hackers but only some of them are confident at writing English. Most important literature is translated in Chinese, and they prefer reading translated versions. Comments in the code are in Chinese. It is sometime a bit more difficult for us for variables and functions names but it works.

I would agree that a good coder must be able to express clearly and unambiguously complex processes in mother tongue and his programming language of choice but excellent grasp of English is only a "nice to have", when your local community is developed enough.